Brian Naylor

In this role, he covers politics and federal agencies, including transportation and homeland security.

With more than 30 years of experience at NPR, Naylor has served as National Desk correspondent, White House correspondent, congressional correspondent, foreign correspondent and newscaster during All Things Considered. He has filled in as host on many NPR programs, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation.

During his NPR career, Naylor has covered many of the major world events, including political conventions, the Olympics, the White House, Congress and the mid-Atlantic region. Naylor reported from Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from New Orleans following the BP oil spill, and from West Virginia after the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine.

While covering the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, Naylor's reporting contributed to NPR's 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism award for political reporting.

Before coming to NPR in 1982, Naylor worked at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and at a commercial radio station in Maine.

Among the nine victims of Wednesday's shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. was its pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who was also a was also a Democratic state senator. He was 41.

According to the church's website, Pinckney "answered the call to preach at the age of 13 and received his first appointment to pastor at the age of 18."

Jeb Bush formally declared his candidacy for the White House on Monday.

"Our country is on a very bad course. And the question is: What are we going to do about it? The question for me is: What am I going to do about it? And I have decided — I am a candidate for president of the United States," Bush said during a rally at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus.

With that announcement, the former Florida governor becomes the 11th major Republican candidate seeking the party's presidential nomination.

The Internal Revenue Service, hoping to reduce the number of fraudulent tax returns filed each year, says it's partnering with several tax preparation and software firms in an effort to protect taxpayers.

The initiative, announced by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, will include steps the IRS believes will better authenticate the identity of taxpayers and the information included on tax return submissions.

The president of the largest federal employees union says all data for every current and retired federal employee and up to 1 million former employees were stolen by hackers. He says those data include names and Social Security numbers, military service and insurance and pension information.

The government has acknowledged that data of as many as 4 million current and former employees and retirees were stolen, but it hasn't detailed which employees were affected. Nor has it specified which data were stolen.

The engineer at the controls of the Amtrak train that derailed in Philadelphia last month was not using his cellphone during the time he was operating train No. 188.

The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday released a long-awaited analysis of cellphone records to determine whether the engineer was distracted at the time of the May 12 accident. Eight people died and some 200 others were injured in the derailment.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security says his office is "deeply concerned" about the ability of the Transportation Security Administration to carry out its mission. John Roth told a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that despite hundreds of recommendations on security procedures "some problems appear to persist."

One of the difficulties that first responders during the Sept. 11 attacks faced was problematic communication, including radios that didn't allow different agencies to speak with one another.

It would seem like a simple problem to solve, and in the years since, the Department of Homeland Security has spent heavily, equipping agencies with new radios and special reserved frequencies for them to operate on.